Sirius Black: "Your dad's place. Your grandparents were really good about it; they sort of adopted me as a second son. Yeah, I camped out at your dad's in the school holidays, and when I was seventeen I got a place of my own. My Uncle Alphard had left me a decent bit of gold — he's been wiped off here, too, that's probably why — anyway, after that I looked after myself."

He was disinherited and removed from the Black Family tree by his sister Walburga, for giving "a decent amount of gold" to his nephew Sirius Black, who was disowned and disinherited after running away from home at the age of sixteen.[4] This may indicate that Alphard did not hold blood purity to be of great importance, the way most of his family members did, considering that the rest of the Blacks shunned Sirius for being a "blood traitor". Another possibility is that he simply had a very good relationship with Sirius, and did not care that he was disowned.

Etymology

Like many members of the Black family, Alphard is named after a star. Alphard is the brightest star in the constellation Hydra, and is known as the heart of the serpent. Its name is derived from the Arabic فرد|الفرد (Al Fard), meaning "the solitary one".

↑In Chapter 4 of Half-Blood Prince, Horace Slughorn states: "The whole Black family had been in my house, but Sirius ended up in Gryffindor!" This implies that all Blacks except Sirius were Sorted into Slytherin while Slughorn was Head of House. Alphard, born sometime between 1925 and 1929, would have attended Hogwarts in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and thus would have been a student of Slughorn, who was stated to have begun teaching at Hogwarts around the same time as Albus Dumbledore in Chapter 5 of Half-Blood Prince, in 1938 or earlier. Sirius Black also states "My whole family have been in Slytherin" and in Chapter 23 of Deathly Hallows, confirming that at least those Blacks closely related to Sirius were in Slytherin.